Introduction

Introduction

Docno:

Paris and Amsterdam in 1780

John Adams ended the year 1780 by observing that it had been “the most anxious and
mortifying Year of my whole Life.”1 The documents presented in volumes 9 and 10 supply ample evidence of the anxiety
and mortification that he experienced, but they also offer an unparalleled portrait
of Adams the diplomat, first at Paris, as he tried against all odds to initiate Anglo-American
peace negotiations, and then at Amsterdam, as he sought against equally formidable
obstacles to encourage European political and financial support for the American cause.

John Adams was named minister to negotiate Anglo-American peace and commercial treaties
on 27 September 1779, and by early February 1780, after a perilous voyage on the French
frigate La Sensible and an arduous trek through Spain, he reached Paris.2 There, with his sons John Quincy and Charles, and secretaries Francis Dana and John
Thaxter, Adams took up residence at the Hôtel de Valois on the Rue de Richelieu. Adams
remained in Paris through July, seeking to execute his mission in the face of vigorous
opposition from the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes. The French minister
feared that Adams' efforts to bring the North ministry to the negotiating table would
only divide the Franco-American alliance and encourage the common enemy. Historians
have long focused on the two men's sharp exchanges over Adams' mission as well as
their views of Congress' revaluation of its currency, and the adequacy of French military
and financial aid to the United States. But the present volumes do not merely lay
out the dramatic Adams-Vergennes correspondence, they also illuminate Adams' motives
in his dispute with Vergennes.

The single most important document for understanding Adams' view of Franco-American
and Anglo-American relations and his con• { xvi } duct as a diplomat is his reworking of Thomas Pownall's A Memorial, Most Humbly Addressed to the Sovereigns of Europe, on the Present State
of Affairs, Between the Old and New World (London, 1780). Adams published his revision as Pensées sur la révolution de l'Amérique-Unie, extraites de l'ouvrage anglois, intitulé
mémoire, addressé aux souverains de l'Europe, sur l'état présent des affaires de l'ancien
et du nouveau-monde (Amsterdam, 1780), and as A Translation of the Memorial to the Sovereigns of Europe upon the Present State of
Affairs Between the Old and New World into Common Sense and Intelligible English (London, 1781).3 Pownall's pamphlet was the catalyst that prompted Adams to draw together his own
ideas and form a coherent view of American foreign policy that would be his guide
in all future diplomatic endeavors.

Adams saw Pownall's notion that Britain's political and economic welfare demanded
peace and free trade as a wedge that he might use to open peace negotiations. This
strategy, and a growing perception of France as an obstacle to peace, prompted Adams
to reply to a pamphlet entitled Cool Thoughts (London, 1780 [i.e. 1779]), written by Joseph Galloway, a loyalist exile and former Pennsylvania politician.
Adams' rebuttal, entitled “Letters from a Distinguished American” when published in
1782, countered Galloway's justification for Britain's continuation of the war and,
as an inducement to those Englishmen for whom the Franco-American alliance was an
obstacle to peace, declared that the alliance would last no longer than the war.4 These and other documents show that as Adams' conflict with Vergennes intensified,
he was drawn to the possibility of a peace settlement in 1780. And as this vision
grew stronger, his willingness to accept Vergennes' concerns as valid diminished.
This led to increasingly contentious exchanges in June and July, and, on 29 July,
Vergennes broke off all relations with Adams. Two days earlier, however, Adams had
left Paris to go to Holland for what he believed would be a brief visit.5

Adams had no suspicion, upon his arrival at Amsterdam in mid August, that he was beginning
a most important two-year mission to the Netherlands. But in October, he learned that
Henry Laurens, Congress' minister to the Netherlands, had been captured and im• { xvii } prisoned in London. Using his authorization from Congress to act in Laurens' place,
Adams intensified his efforts to promote American interests and took on the role of
de facto minister to the Netherlands. Despite the friendship and support offered him
by individuals, Adams' letters indicate his surprise at finding far less Dutch support
for America than he had expected. In an effort to advance the American cause, he cultivated
the friendship of such men as Hendrik Calkoen, an Amsterdam lawyer; Jean Luzac, editor
of the Gazette de Leyde; Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, the highest ranking Dutch partisan of the
American cause; Antoine Marie Cerisier, a pro-American publicist; and Hendrik Bicker,
a leading Amsterdam banker. Adams exchanged letters with each of these men, but two
are of particular interest: Calkoen posed a series of questions to Adams, who replied
with twenty-six letters that emphasized the bond between the Dutch and American republics,
each having its origin in a revolt against a despotic occupying power;6 and Luzac proved an important ally by publishing Adams' Pensées and offering his newspaper as a ready forum for Adams' contributions.

With few exceptions, such as a brief correspondence on the production and quality
of Bordeaux wines,7 the documents in these volumes reflect John Adams' devotion to the business of diplomacy.
Adams conducted an extensive, but one-sided, correspondence with Congress. He requested
intelligence and instructions on such matters as a truce and his relations with Vergennes,
but received little in return. Most of his eighty-seven letters written to Congress
from March through July concerned such matters as the League of Armed Neutrality,
the County Association Movement in England, the Gordon Riots, and British, French,
and Spanish military and naval deployments. Adams became Congress' principal source
of European intelligence, obtaining his information from British and European newspapers,
and from such men as Edmund Jenings and William Lee at Brussels, Thomas Digges at
London, John Bondfield at Bordeaux, Joshua Johnson at Nantes, and Joseph Gardoqui
at Bilbao.

To dispel misperceptions about the American cause and promote his peace initiative,
Adams supplied Edmé Jacques Genet with items for his Mercure de France and sent pieces to Edmund Jenings for publication in England. He tried to avoid involving
himself in Ben• { xviii } jamin Franklin's business, and when he was forced to, as in the controversy over Pierre
Landais' command of the frigate Alliance, he did so reluctantly.8 Adams wrote to friends in America, such as Samuel Adams, James Lovell, Benjamin Rush,
and James Warren, and received useful information on political and military events
in return, but his trans-Atlantic correspondence was relatively sparse, and he often
complained that inadequate American intelligence hindered his efforts in Europe.

Fewer letters are printed for the five months of 1780 that John Adams spent in Amsterdam
than for the similar span of his residence in Paris. This is because Adams wrote fewer
letters to Congress, had no correspondence with the Dutch government, failed to record
some letters in his Letterbooks, and had a smaller circle of acquaintances. He continued
to correspond with Edmund Jenings, Thomas Digges, and William Lee, all of whom wrote
on the steadily deteriorating state of Anglo-Dutch relations. Although he wrote fewer
letters to Congress, those that he did write were more substantive. Many were intended
to inform Congress about the complex nature of the Dutch government, if only to make
clear the reasons for his apparent lack of success.

These volumes show John Adams to be an active, intelligent diplomat, determined to
further his nation's interests as he saw them. His actions, whether at Paris or Amsterdam,
were carefully calculated to promote his view of American foreign policy. But unlike
most of his contemporaries, Adams was as concerned with the long-term as he was with
the short-term interests of the United States. While in France, this led him to revise
Pownall's Memorial, debate the Comte de Vergennes over the existing and future Franco-American relationship,
and attempt to initiate peace negotiations. In the Netherlands, particularly after
learning of Henry Laurens' capture, Adams began efforts to raise a loan and opened
a propaganda offensive to educate the Dutch about the American cause. For John Adams,
1780 was anxious and mortifying because so much had been tried and so little accomplished,
but he could hope that “more Vigour, Wisdom and Decision may govern the Councils,
Negotiations and Operations of Mankind in the Year 1781.”9

John Adams and His Letterbooks

John Adams' Letterbooks are indispensable because they often permit the reconstruction
of an entire correspondence when Adams' original, outgoing letters have been lost,
and because they supply text that is missing from damaged recipient's copies. From
1 March through 31 December 1780, John Adams recorded most of his public and private
letters in Letterbooks numbered 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14; which appear respectively
on reels 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, and 102 of the Adams Papers microfilm. The first three,
containing copies of public and private letters for the period from November 1779
through July 1780, have been described in the Introduction to volumes 7 and 8, which
also contains a general discussion of the nature of John Adams' Letterbooks.10

Letterbook 12, entitled “Paris 1780 From June 10. to August 14. 1780. Peace.,” contains
twenty letters to the president of Congress.11 Numbered 81 to 100, these copies are, with the exception of a portion of No. 91 and
all of No. 100, drafts in John Adams' hand and complete the record, begun in Letterbook
10, of his correspondence with Congress from his arrival in Spain in 1779 to his departure
from France in 1780.12 As in Letterbook 10, John Thaxter's notations explain the means by which the letters
were sent to Congress. The letters fill 68 pages of the 292-page Letterbook, the remainder
of which is blank, except for ten pages near the end where Thaxter recorded statistics
on population, trade, weather, and the costs of outfitting naval vessels. The intended
use of this material is unknown.

Letterbook 13, entitled “Holland 1780 Vol. 1. From August 14. 1780 to Feb. 7. 1781
and Letters to The P.H. Jan. 22. 1782 Pol. Holl.,” contains John Adams' letters to
the president of Congress written at Amsterdam between 14 August 1780 and 7 February
1781. Adams restarted his numbering system upon arriving at Amsterdam so the first
letter is No. 1 and the last, “never sent nor copied,” is No. 44. The letters to Congress
are followed by drafts of four letters to { xx } Antoine Marie Cerisier, publisher of Le politique hollandais, that were done on or about 22 January 1782, in which Adams commented on Révolution de l'Amérique by Guillaume Thomas François, Abbé Raynal.13 Adams used 102 pages of Letterbook 13, leaving the rest blank.

Letterbook 14 contains 203 private letters, many of these copies by John Thaxter,
and is entitled “Holland August 17. 1780 to April [1782] Amsterdam Leyden.” It begins
with John Adams' letter of 17 August 1780 to Francis Dana and ends with that of 26
April 1782 to the Amsterdam merchant John Hodshon. Adams wrote one hundred of these
letters in 1780, the last being that of 18 December to Edmund Jenings. Unfortunately,
he recorded no letters between 10 and 16 December or between 19 December 1780 and
15 January 1781. This has resulted in the loss of an undetermined number of letters
to Thomas Digges, William Lee, and others.

Notes on Editorial Method

Since the first volumes of the Papers of John Adams appeared in 1977, some changes have occurred in the editorial method. Most have been
refinements, resulting from the need to deal with specific problems that arose during
the editorial process, but it seems appropriate here to reiterate the central aspects
of the editorial method common to all volumes and to make clear the principles that
have guided the editors in the preparation of the present volumes.

The decision to print, calendar, or omit a document is based on how well it illuminates
John Adams' thoughts and personal behavior. The degree to which Adams played a role
in a document's creation is of paramount concern in deciding whether to include it.
The editors also consider whether a document is a repetition of a letter already printed
or calendared; is a routine letter of transmittal or recommendation; or is a letter
to Adams requesting help or favors. All letters omitted from volumes 9 and 10 are
listed in the Appendix immediately preceding the index.

Most of the 131 letters that John Adams wrote to the president of Congress from March
through December 1780 have been calendared. Almost all of them appear in Francis Wharton's
Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, and consist of extracts { xxi } from printed sources, material taken from letters to Adams, or comments repeated by
him in letters to other correspondents. A letter to the president of Congress is printed
in the Papers of John Adams when Wharton's version differs materially from either the recipient's copy or Adams'
Letterbook copy, or when it led directly to action by Congress, was a request for
instructions, or presents a significant analysis of an important issue not repeated
elsewhere. This last consideration has resulted in the publication of a higher percentage
of Adams' letters written at Amsterdam than at Paris.

One change in the format of calendar entries should be noted. Endorsements on calendared
letters will be omitted when they merely indicate a letter's date and author and provide
a brief summary of its contents. The date on which the letter was received or read
in Congress, if indicated, will be noted in the text of the calendar. Letterbook copies
of Adams' letters to Congress will not be routinely mentioned if the only reason for
doing so is to indicate a letter's number, but if it contains a substantial notation
the Letterbook copy will be indicated and the notation included.

Other categories of documents also need to be mentioned. In these and other volumes,
the editors have presented a few important documents written by John Adams, or by
him in collaboration with others, in more than one form. The changes and development
of the text in these cases is too elaborate to handle clearly with editorial apparatus
and footnotes joined to only one printed text.14 French and Dutch documents are followed by an English translation in which the footnote
numbers are repeated. Translations provided by the editors appear in a smaller typeface,
but when a contemporary translation used by John Adams in the course of his activities
is available, it has been used in preference to a modern one because of its historical
relevance. Because it then constitutes a separate document, it is set in the normal
font size. Third-party documents, those involving Adams but not written by or sent
to him, are occasionally included based on the editors' judgment of their intrinsic
worth to the study of our subject.

Letters or documents often exist in more than one form. When multiple copies of the
same letter were sent, we print the copy that was received first. When another copy
of the text exists (i.e. draft, { xxii } Letterbook copy), differences between that and the printed text are noted when they
reveal something about the intentions, style, and mood of the author. Copies of letters
that were made from the recipient's copy ordinarily are not referred to in our descriptive
note on the text; if significant, they are mentioned in the footnotes.

Our primary purpose is to present a text that can be read by both scholars and the
general public, while striving faithfully to retain the spelling, grammar, capitalization,
and punctuation of the original manuscript. While no transcription policy can take
care of all questions that will arise, the following practices guide us in our efforts.

Punctuation follows that in the manuscript with the following rules for intelligibility.
All sentence breaks are retained as in the manuscript, but when needed we silently
supply an uppercase letter at the beginning of the sentence and a period at the end.
Dashes obviously intended to be terminal marks are converted to periods, and superfluous
dashes are removed, but dashes evidently intended to indicate breaks or shifts in
thought or used as semi-paragraphing devices are retained. Minimum punctuation for
intelligibility is silently supplied in dialogue and quoted matter. If quotation marks
appear only at one end or the other of a passage of direct discourse, the matching
pair is supplied without notation when its location is clearly determinable, but quotation
marks are not systematically inserted according to modern usage. The editors have
refrained from altering, suppressing, or supplying punctuation in passages that are
truly ambiguous. When punctuation is supplied in a passage where there could be more
than one reading, it is always noted.

Abbreviations and contractions are preserved as found in names of persons and places;
in the datelines, salutations, and complimentary closes of letters; in endorsements
and docketings; in units of money and measurement; and in accounts and other tabular
documents. They are also retained elsewhere if they are still in use or are recognizable.
Ambiguous abbreviations are silently expanded when the editors are certain of their
meaning. Abbreviations that are indeterminate or questionable are expanded in brackets
following the abbreviation. Where abbreviations are retained, superscript letters
used to indicate contractions are brought down to the line. The ampersand is retained
in the form “&c.” and in the names of firms; elsewhere it is rendered as “and.”

Missing and illegible matter is indicated by square brackets enclosing the editors'
conjectural readings (with a question mark appended if the reading is doubtful), or
by suspension points if no reading can { xxiii } be given. If only a portion of a word is missing, it may be silently supplied when
there is no doubt about the reading. When the missing or illegible matter amounts
to more than one or two words, a footnote estimating its amount is attached.

Canceled matter in the manuscripts is included when it is of stylistic, psychological,
or historical interest. In our text such passages are italicized and enclosed in angle
brackets. If a revised equivalent of a canceled passage remains in the text, the canceled
matter always precedes it.

Variant readings (variations in text between two or more versions of the same letter
or document) are indicated when they are significant enough to warrant recording,
and then always in footnotes keyed to the basic text that is printed in full.

Editorial insertions are italicized and enclosed in square brackets.

In recent years the editors have tended to a slightly more literal rendering of the
text, especially in retaining peculiar but often consistent punctuation and abbreviation
oddities. This practice reflects the expanded awareness and expectations of both our
academic and general audiences. The editors know, however, that there is no way to
give the reader a completely literal textual reproduction except by document facsimile.

In addition to the 627 letters and documents in these two volumes and the 168 omitted
letters listed at the end of vol. 10, over 100 letters by or to several Adamses for
the period March–December 1780 appear in Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 3:292–425, and vol. 4:1–56. The most important of these, for a full appreciation of John Adams' public career
in 1780, are 21 letters from John to Abigail Adams, and 14 letters from Abigail to
John. Another 13 letters written by John to Abigail, and 4 by Abigail to John, from
November 1779 through February 1780, also contain much valuable material for this
same period. Other important correspondences in the Family volumes for 1780 include those between John Adams and John Quincy Adams, Richard
Cranch, Isaac Smith Sr., John Thaxter, and Cotton Tufts; interesting views of John
Adams' life in Europe and commentary on public matters appear in Abigail Adams' correspondence
with John Quincy Adams, Elbridge Gerry, James Lovell, John Thaxter, and Mercy Otis
Warren. The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, especially vol. 2:344–453, and vol. 4:173–254, and the Diary of John Quincy Adams, vol. 1:1–75, are most helpful in understanding John Adams' diplomatic mission and in following
his travels through Europe in 1779–1780.

10. Introduction, part 2, “John Adams and his Letterbooks,” 7:xxv–xxvii; see also notes 37 and 38 there for Letterbook 9, AA's only attempt to keep a Letterbook; and Letterbook 34, containing a record of JA's expenses from February through July 1780.

11. On the inside front cover is a bookplate for “Furgault, Marchand de Papiers,” the
same stationer from whom JA had purchased Letterbooks 10 and 11.

12. In letter No. 91, John Thaxter finished copying the text of a memorial from Amsterdam
merchants to the States General. Letter No. 100, dated 14 Aug., was inserted by Thaxter
while JA was in Amsterdam and has not been printed; see JA to the president of Congress, No. 1, 14 Aug., note 1 (below).